Tag Archives: translation

Beate Jones has recently translated into German Campbell Smith’s play about the Waikato artist Margot Philips, This Green Land.

Campbell Smith and Margot Philips

We’re pleased that Beate and Campbell have agreed to share this with our readers, as this is the first appearance of the German translation anywhere. Here we bring you Scene 2, in which a young Margo meets a New Zealand soldier in Cologne for the first time.

The scene is in the original English and then is followed by Beate Jones’s German translation. At the end readers can enjoy biographical notes on Margot Phillips and Campbell Smith, as well as the translator Beate Jones.

from Cambpell Smith’s This Green Land

Scene 2: ENCOUNTER WITH A NEW ZEALAND SOLDIER

MARGOT: There were other soldiers. The Army of Occupation. Talked to one once. An “Anzac”, I

N.Z. SOLDIER: Orh, are ya. Eighteen, eh. Me sister at home. She be about that age now. I reckon. Yeah. Haven’t seen her for, orh…Just on three years now. Yeah, must be! Yeah, three years.

MARGOT: That is a long time, Soldier. To be away from your home.

N.Z. SOLDIER: Yeah, ’tis. Isn’t it. Bloody long time!

BOTH ARE SILENT, REFLECTING ON THE WAR.

Would you like some chocolate?

OFFERS CHOCOLATE TO MARGOT, SHE BREAKS OFF A PIECE, EATS IT, SOLDIER DOES THE SAME. THEY EAT IN SILENCE, MARGOT ALMOST IN ECSTASY AT THE TASTE OF CHOCOLATE.

N.Z. SOLDIER: Pretty good, eh?

MARGOT: Oooh! Haven’t tasted chocolate for years and years.

SOLDIER HANDS CHOCOLATE BAR TO MARGOT. SHE REFUSES.

N.Z. SOLDIER: Nah, nah. Go on. Keep it, eh.

MARGOT: Oh, thank you, Soldier. But I cannot stay.

N.Z. SOLDIER: Yeah, that’s OK, Fraulein.

MARGOT OFFERS HER HAND, THEY SHAKE HANDS.

MARGOT: Been nice talking to you, Soldier.

N.Z. SOLDIER: Yeah, it has. Hasn’t it. Good bye. (EXITS)

MARGOT: (WATCHES HIM, CRIES OUT) Oh, Soldier? That place, what country? (REALIZING HE HAS GONE, SPEAKS QUIETLY) Are you from. (LOOKS AT CHOCOLATE. THE TEMPTATION IS TOO GREAT, TAKES IT OUT AND BREAKS OFF A TINY PIECE, EATS IT, SPEAKS TO AUDIENCE) Never told Mother. Little Margot Philips. A good German girl talking to a soldier from the other side of the world. But oh, that chocolate.

We thank Beate Jones for including the following about Margot Philips and Campbell Smith:

Margot Leonie Louisa Philips was born on 5 April 1902 in Duisburg-Ruhrort, Germany. She was the youngest of five children born to Selma and Julius Philips. Margot’s father was a grain merchant who could provide a comfortable living for his family and who had a strong sense of their Jewish background but a liberal outlook.

World War I brought about the collapse of the business and when Margot’s father died their comfortable lifestyle came to an end. Margot subsequently trained as a shorthand typist and found employment from 1929 to 1934 with a chain of department stores but eventually lost her job because she was Jewish.

In 1935 Margot left Germany and found temporary refuge and work in England. From there she helped organize her brother Kurt’s emigration, along with his wife, to New Zealand, where they settled in Hamilton and from where they sponsored Margot’s emigration.

After her arrival in her new home country, Margot worked as a waitress in her brother’s coffeehouse in Hamilton, “The Vienna”, contributing a bit of European otherness to an otherwise rural and conservative environment.

When she was about 48 she took first tentative steps into the world of visual arts. Her attempts at drawing failed but she persevered and finally developed, with the help of her Auckland-based tutor Colin McCahon, her own unique style of painting her favourite and almost exclusive subject: the Waikato landscape.

Margot Philips had a few exhibitions and in 1987 her contribution to art in the Waikato was honoured with an exhibition entitled “Margot Philips – Her Own World” to mark the opening of the new Waikato Museum of Arts and History.

In December 1988 Margot Philips passed away at the Trevellyn Rest Home for the Aged where she had spent her last few years.

Summary of Margot Philip’s biography based on Margaret Sutherland, ‘Margot Philips’ in James N. Beade (ed), Out of the Shadow of War. The German Connection with New Zealand in the Twentieth Century (Auckland, 1998). pp 123 -127

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Campbell Smith was born in Masterton in 1925. After an apprenticeship as a signwriter, he studied painting at the Canterbury School of Art before becoming a teacher and spending two years in London where he earned a living as a supply teacher. In 1956 he returned to New Zealand to work as a teacher at Waihi College. In the relative isolation of Waihi and still keenly interested in the Arts, Campbell took up wood engraving. In 1961 he moved to Hamilton, where he taught at Fairfield College while remaining heavily involved in the local art scene as the president of the Waikato Society of Arts. In 1971 Campbell became director of the Hamilton Art Gallery, then director of Fine Arts at the Waikato Museum. He held this position until his retirement in 1985.

Through his involvement with the Arts, Campbell Smith got to know Margot Philips quite well but the idea to write a play about her came to him after he met Jorge Alvarez, the ambassador of Mexico in New Zealand, at an exhibition opening in 2001. Alvarez had fallen in love with Margot Philips’s paintings and even purchased one to take back to his home country. Campbell, who had written more than twenty plays, decided to retell Margot’s story of loss and re-creation in his play originally titled “Waikato-Green” but later re-named “This Green Land”.

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Beate Jones, a Bavarian by birth, lived for seven years in Munich, where she studied English and French at the Ludwig-Maximilian University, before following her New Zealand husband-to-be to Hamilton, New Zealand. She has been living in Hamilton ever since. While her first impression of Hamilton, after having lived in Munich, was not entirely positive, the city and its people, like the river Waikato, have wormed their way into her heart and these days she feels very protective of her elected home, which she feels offers some of the best possible compromises of living a city life in an almost rural way.

Beate has been teaching German for more than 20 years at the University of Waikato. She is currently enrolled in a PhD in Literary Translation at Victoria University in Wellington. Writing poetry, short stories and the translation from German to English of a range of texts have been an interesting and challenging sideline to her work.

For years now, the literaturWERKstatt berlin has been staging an annual Summer Night’s Poetry Festival called “Weltklang”. This is the largest poetry event in Germany featuring poets from home and abroad. Parallel to that, the literaturWERKstatt berlin has set up a poetry platform on the Internet which regularly presents collections of poetry read by the authors themselves: Lyrikline.org

Lyrikline’s declared intention is to exploit the multimedia experience the Internet offers (text, image, sound) so as to increase the dissemination, popularity, reception and sales of poetry – and the translation of poems: Started as a German-language poetry platform, the webpage itself now opens in 5 language versions: german, english, french, slovakian and arabic and includes poems and translations inover 50 languages, with more than 10.000 translated poem online, some links:

In her short story collection Once upon a time in Aotearoa Tina Makareti explores a world where old myths become part of everyday life and encounters between reality and magic are taken for granted.

Tina Makereti lives in Wellington, and is of Ngati Tuwharetoa, Te Ati Awa, Ngati Maniapoto, Irish, Welsh, English and possibly even Moriori and Scandinavian descent. Included in this feature is “Kaitiaki”, a short story from her collection that reveals the loneliness of old age and city life and the consolation and protection offered by the mountains. Here are the opening paragraphs in English and German. Further below is the full short story in both languages.

Interview with translator Anita Goetthans

For readers who are only starting to explore New Zealand literature, we spoke with the German translator of the story Anita Goetthans about some key elements of the collection and its translation, and about her own transition from Germany to New Zealand. Goetthans is a free-lance translator and interpreter and also teaches at the Translation and Interpreting Centre at AUT, Auckland University of Technology. She has been living in Auckland, New Zealand since 1996.

Could you tell us a bit about the story Kaitiaki, and about the way it connects to the past and present cultural landscape of New Zealand?

When I read Tina’s stories I fell in love with almost every single one of them. Although there is only one author behind these stories each of them seems to have its individual voice and idiosyncratic language depending on the narrator.

In Kaitiaki it is the kuia, an old Maori lady, who’s been disenfranchised from her rural home near the mountains for a long time, living alone and isolated in a city environment which becomes stranger and stranger to her by the day.

This is a common enough occurrence in the big cities, especially following the huge influx of rural Maori when labour was needed in the 1960s. In this decade te reo Maori was almost forgotten and frowned upon in primary and secondary schools. When the language was in danger of becoming almost extinct a huge effort was made in the 1980s to revive it, with some success.